The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is holding a hearing on “Conflicts of Interest, Investor Loss of Confidence, and High Speed Trading in U.S. Stock Markets,” and MarketWatch’s Steve Goldstein will be live-blogging the proceedings on this high-profile topic.

9:14 am (EDT)

Good morning. The hearing will get going in about 15 minutes or so. Stay tuned for what ought to be a very interesting discussion on high-frequency trading.

If the Securities and Exchange Commission were to adopt reforms similar to what’s been put in place in other countries, dark-pool volume may drop by half, according to the CEO of Liquidnet. Liquidnet is one of several so-called “dark pools” that allow buyers and sellers to place trade, essentially, in the dark.

The market is talking about the “60 Minutes” piece on Michael Lewis’s allegations that the market is rigged due to high-frequency trading, but the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday was focusing more on insider trading.

It’s couched in dry language, as any “strategic plan from 2014 to 2018″ would suggest. But the Securities and Exchange Commission’s draft plan suggests that concern over the functioning of markets is at the very top of its wish list.

A slight random delay before orders are processed could help end the high-frequency trading “arms race,” says a new study “Equity Trading in the 21st Century,” produced by three academics.

Currently, market regulations require investors to have time priority – in other words the first trade received is to be executed first. The academics propose that all trading instructions be delayed by a random period of time ranging from 0 to 10 milliseconds before they are processed.